World Press Photo Revokes Prize

Image

A photograph that was part of a winning package at the World Press Photo awards. The image, of an intimate scene in Charleroi, Belgium, came under scrutiny over whether it broke contest rules.CreditCreditGiovanni Troilo

PARIS — Following days of intense controversy, the jury of one of photojournalism’s top awards, the World Press Photo contest, stripped an Italian photographer of a first prize after it found that he had misrepresented the location of one of the atmospheric images.

The Amsterdam-based organization said on Wednesday that it had disqualified “The Dark Heart of Europe,” a 10-photo series by Giovanni Troilo about gritty Charleroi, Belgium.

“The World Press Photo Contest must be based on trust in the photographers who enter their work and in their professional ethics,” Lars Boering, the managing director of World Press Photo, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We now have a clear case of misleading information and this changes the way the story is perceived. A rule has now been broken, and a line has been crossed.”

The decision to rescind the award came a day after a leading photojournalism festival, Visa Pour L’Image, said it would not show any World Press Photos this year to protest what it said were staged photos. At a time when anyone with an Instagram account can become a de facto reporter, the controversy raises questions about what viewers should know about photos classified as journalism — and where one of the world’s most respected photo prizes draws the line between documentary photography and art photography.

“The bottom line is, what should the public expect?” said the photographer Gary Knight, who has been on the World Press Photo jury four times and chairman twice, most recently in 2014, and who said he had questions about Mr. Troilo’s methodology. “If the public have no confidence in visual journalism, that’s a serious problem — not only for visual journalism, but for the public and for our societies and for our democracies.”

“I’m very sad,” Mr. Troilo said after learning that the award had been rescinded. He said the controversy had begun after World Press Photo rewrote his original photo captions, and he said he thought the organization had been looking for “an exit strategy.” “It seems a big injustice,” he said.

The controversy erupted last week and was more focused on a photo in which Mr. Troilo had photographed his cousin having sex with a woman in the back of a car, using a remote-control flash to illuminate the steamy back seat. By putting a flash in the car, critics had said, Mr. Troilo effectively staged the photo, violating the rules of the contest. The photographer disagreed.

The World Press Photo jury at the time said his work — which won in the Contemporary Issues category — could be seen as documentary photography or portraiture, where such use of a flash is considered acceptable.

This year’s World Press Photo jury is led by Michele McNally, the director of photography and an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, and many photojournalists are questioning whether Mr. Troilo’s photos met The Times’s standards. In The Times, “a staged photograph is not acceptable in news pictures that are used to depict real situations and events,” Ms. McNally wrote in an email message. “Portraiture and fashion and still lifes are of course produced and directed.”

The scrutiny has been all the more intense since World Press jurors acknowledged last month that they had disqualified 20 percent of the photos that made the contest’s final rounds because they had been digitally manipulated by photographers who added or subtracted key elements of the images in post-processing, violating the rules of photographic integrity.

“Every year there is debate and discussion; this year I think we really, really had a lot of troubles,” Mr. Boering said. “There was a huge amount of manipulation in the penultimate round. The jury was really shocked.”

World Press Photo began an initial investigation last week, after receiving a letter from the mayor of Charleroi, who said that Mr. Troilo’s photos had cast Charleroi in a negative light and that several of the photos had been staged, including one of a woman in a mental-health facility and the one of the couple in the car.

In clarifications posted on its website starting Sunday, World Press Photo stood by Mr. Troilo and said the confusion stemmed from misleading captions that the contest had written based on Mr. Troilo’s more complete original material. The jury had been read the original captions out loud during the final critique and had not raised questions at that time.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Boering said World Press Photo had reopened the investigation after receiving word that Mr. Troilo had taken one of the images in the studio of the artist Vadim Vosters outside Brussels and not in Charleroi.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Troilo, who is 37 and based in Rome, acknowledged that he had taken the photo, which shows a male model stretched out naked on a table re-enacting a painting, in Molenbeek, an area of Brussels. But he called the confusion a technical error, not a misrepresentation. “I made a mistake, I can’t deny that,” Mr. Troilo said, speaking in Italian.

He said he had made the mistake “out of distraction” while he and an assistant were entering caption information on deadline.

The photographer, who grew up in Italy and has close relatives in Charleroi, said he hadn’t meant to hide anything and that Mr. Vosters was a well-known artist in Belgium whose studio was known to be in Molenbeek, a neighborhood from which homegrown jihadis have traveled to Syria.

The photo of the couple in the car provoked some of the most intense scrutiny. The original caption posted on the World Press Photo website said, “locals know of parking lots popular for sexual liaisons.”

Mr. Troilo said he had made it clear to World Press Photo that he had followed his cousin on a night when his cousin had planned to have sex and had his cousin’s consent. “This is not a stolen photo of a couple caught unawares,” Mr. Troilo said. He said his goal was “to show voyeurism through voyeurism. The camera becomes active; it becomes the sense of shame.”

Mr. Troilo said he didn’t want to become “the scapegoat” for a larger debate about World Press Photo’s standards.

World Press Photo rules state that “staging is defined as something that would not have happened without the photographer’s involvement.” Many photojournalists believed that Mr. Troilo had crossed a line. “Having a photographer involved with the subject toward a finished image has a place in photography; it’s in portraiture,” said Greg Marinovich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer from South Africa who has served on the World Press Photo jury twice. “If they stand by what they say, that you cannot stage events in photojournalism, then this set of pictures should be disqualified.”

The controversy seems to tap into larger questions about the contest. “World Press has press in the title; it doesn’t say World Art Photo,” said Yunghi Kim, a New York-based photographer who said she had submitted photos to the award this year and didn’t win. “I don’t fault the photographer, it just seems World Press is having an identity crisis.”

An even stronger rebuke came from Jean François Leroy, the head of the annual Visa Pour L’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France. On his Facebook page, Mr. Leroy said that this year the festival would not showcase any images that had won World Press Photo awards. “The photojournalists we want to represent do not call upon their cousins to fornicate in a car,” he wrote.

Mr. Boering said the controversy was a chance to add more transparency to the process. “I want it to be a proper debate,” he said. “The changes in photojournalism and documentary photography are fast and it’s hard for everyone to keep up.”

Correction:

An article on Thursday about the World Press Photo contest misstated the number of times the photographer Gary Knight has been chairman of the contest jury. He has headed it two times, not four. The article also misidentified the subject of a photograph taken by Giovanni Troilo at the studio of the artist Vadim Vosters outside Brussels. The photograph depicts a naked male model stretched out on a table; it does not depict Mr. Vosters.